207. Book and Dagger: Yale Professors Become Successful WWII Spies
Release Date: 04/15/2025
HOLIDAY EPISODES
Grating the Nutmeg
What better way to spend the holidays than curled up next to the fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate and your favorite Grating the Nutmeg episode! To celebrate, we’re spreading history cheer for all to hear.
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TOP 5 MOST STREAMED - 2025
Grating the Nutmeg
2025 is almost GONE! Don’t miss our TOP FIVE most streamed episodes of the year! See more:
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222. Cabbage Patch Kids and West Hartford’s Toymaker Coleco
Grating the Nutmeg
During this holiday season, it seems like the perfect time to bring you the story of one of the bestselling toys ever - Cabbage Patch Kids! Inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame in 2023, Cabbage Patch Kids set every toy industry sales record for three years running from 1983-86, and has become one of the longest-running doll franchises in the United States. How did a Connecticut company produce the hottest toy of the 1980s - and then go broke? The license to produce Cabbage Patch Kids has gone through a record 7 toy companies. This episode is on the Coleco years - the toymaker with their...
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221. New Haven’s Lt. Augusto Rodríguez, First Civil War Soldier from Puerto Rico
Grating the Nutmeg
More than twenty thousand Hispanic Americans served in the Civil War. When Cuban-born Loreta Velázquez’s husband would not allow her to join him on the battlefield, she assumed the role of First Lieutenant Harry T. Buford to be near him. Philip Bazaar, born in Chile, was awarded the Medal of Honor for his courageous exploits during the assault of Fort Fisher. The spying efforts of Floridian Maria Dolores Sánchez and her two sisters led to a Union defeat at the Battle of Horse Landing. Delving into the lives of these individuals, historian A.J. Schenkman, author of...
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220. Connecticut Yankee Atomic Power Plant: The Promise and Peril of Nuclear Energy
Grating the Nutmeg
The Connecticut Yankee atomic power plant was one of the earliest commercial nuclear reactors in New England. Though it was dismantled at the turn of the 21st century, its legacy remains, both for the landscape of the Connecticut River Valley where it once stood, and for contemporary debates about energy today. This episode explores the plant’s life and afterlife, the activists who opposed it, and the promises and perils of nuclear power in the 1960s and today, through the reminiscences of Paul Gionfriddo, a former state legislator and longtime president of People’s Action for...
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219. Transgender History and Connecticut Transgender Pioneer Dr. Alan L. Hart
Grating the Nutmeg
The transgender community has struggled to receive recognition and equality. In this episode, we explore the history of the transgender community over the last 100 years with Dr. Susan Stryker and the life of Dr. Alan L. Hart, a transgender medical doctor working on the forefront of an urgent public health crisis, tuberculosis, in Connecticut. Hart, Director of Connecticut’s Office of TB Rehabilitation, is credited with saving countless lives. My guest is Dr. Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History, the Root of Today’s Revolution, published in 2017. Transgender...
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Get cool stuff in our second annual online #GTN benefit auction!
Grating the Nutmeg
We have amazing items for you in our second annual online benefit auction! The auction is the largest fundraiser of the year for our award-winning CT history podcast. New episodes are released every two weeks full of CT history makers and untold stories, and all episodes are free for all to listen to! Bidding begins on September 25, 2025 at midnight. Bids close at 11:59 on October 18, 2025.
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218. Connecticut in the Industrial Revolution: Making Buttons in Cheshire
Grating the Nutmeg
A button sounds like a very ordinary thing. But button production in Cheshire was part of Connecticut’s pioneering role in the precision manufacturing revolution of the nineteenth century. According to connecticuthistory.org, button production began with pewter buttons in the mid-eighteenth century but quickly turned to brass in the early nineteenth century. By 1860s, machines in the Scovill Brass factory in Waterbury produced 216,000 buttons per day. This type of industrial production volume for an everyday necessity such as buttons propelled investors and entrepreneurs to establish...
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217. The Smith Family of Glastonbury: Hannah and Her Daughters
Grating the Nutmeg
In this episode of Grating the Nutmeg, Natalie Belanger tells us about how two journals kept by a Revolutionary War-era girl in the ’s collection have inspired an original work of music. Several years ago, Leonard Raybon (Associate Professor of Music at Tulane University) encountered two journals and other writings by Hannah Hadassah Hickok, held at the Connecticut Museum. Hannah was the matriarch of the non-conformist Smith Family of Glastonbury. Her daughters would go on to became nationally famous for protesting their lack of voting rights in the 1870s by...
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216. Brewing Community: Labor, Alcohol, and Unrest in Industrial New Britain
Grating the Nutmeg
Immigrants from Lithuania who made their way to New Britain, Connecticut at the beginning of the twentieth century found work in the city’s factories turning out tools and hardware. Their weekly routine included work, church and socializing at neighborhood saloons. But major upheavals in American society were happening at the time that affected their lives including the rise of organized labor, the temperance movement, anti-immigrant sentiment, and labor strikes. In this episode, we have two new voices in public history, Central Connecticut State University students Jon Kozak and...
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In her new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of the World, Dr. Elyse Graham tells the story of academics, like Yale literature professor Joseph Curtis, who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents, and Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa.
At the start of World War II, the United States found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work-and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and the future CIA with their efforts.
This episode’s guest is Dr. Elyse Graham, professor in the English Department at Stony Brook University and the author of four books. Dr.Graham is available for book talks-find the link to her website here:
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This episode of Grating the Nutmeg was produced by Mary Donohue and engineered by Patrick O’Sullivan at https://www.highwattagemedia.com/
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